


Grant Us Peace

by Strigoi17



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, M/M, Pirates, Pirates of the Caribbean stuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-06 21:53:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/740560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strigoi17/pseuds/Strigoi17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The captain sinks back into her seat with an aggravated sigh. His eyes have softened around the edges, and he smiles. As her hand again darts to her side, gripping the battered hilt of her sword, he speaks. “So you’re Vriska Serket.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They were grey skinned and  
Yellow-eyed; their arms  
Lifted planets and  
The horns atop their  
Heads shredded the clouds


	2. Chapter 2

His entire world had burst into flames.

From his bedroom window, he could see nothing but light -- it was night still, it had to be, but on the other side of the glass the world had lit up like dawn. Fire roared up from windows, from barrels, from demolished scraps of wood and from the street itself. It stretched toward the sky and shone so fiercely it must have stolen light from the stars.

John could tell something was wrong: fire hurt, fire was dangerous, fire was something he was never allowed to touch, in the oven or in his candles, and now it was everywhere. But somehow, John wasn’t afraid -- there was chaos teeming at his fingertips and his toes, but the fear stopped cold at the window pane. It couldn’t get to him, and therefore, the panic was interesting as best.  
“Get down,” His father snapped.

John was young, so despite his gnawing curiosity, he did as told. He dropped down from his perch by the window, crouched down on all fours and crawled next to Dad. The man was sitting up, leaned against the frame of his bed; his face was ghostly white and his eyes were orange as they reflected the light from his window.  
When the shouting had first begun, Dad got a funny look on his face that John couldn’t pinpoint. He had ushered John upstairs, unlocked the front door and locked up John’s bedroom after them. John had flinched at the scrape of his bed against the floor when Dad turned it around, shoved it against his bedroom door and leaned his bulk against it. His candle had been snuffed, his curtains drawn and now both of them sat up against his bed, far away from the window.

“Dad,” The boy whispered, repeated his question from earlier. “What’s going on?”

He paused, looking down to his son. Licked his lips once, twice, before speaking. “Bad people, John. Very bad people.”

John wasn’t satisfied. “What people? Are they coming for us?”

“No,” Swallowing, he sniffed his nose once and brought the eight-year-old into his lap. “Pirates don’t specify--”

The sentence wasn’t finished. Below them, noise sounded; an indecipherable yell from an unrecognizable voice, and a gunshot. There was momentary silence where John clung fast to the arms wrapped tight around him, both of them holding their breath in expectation.

For the first time, John was scared. Numb heat bloomed in his chest, vines of it snaking into his limbs and jolting him with harsh shakes that had his father squeezing him tighter. Against his cheek, John could feel his father’s heart skip when the first footstep echoed up their staircase.

The sound of a footstep carried like spilled milk trickling down a slanted tabletop. It snuck through the crack underneath his door, sailed on the flickering light cast by fire in the hallway. Sweat collected on his neck, and suddenly his room was stifling. Uncomfortable in his clothes, he looked up to his father’s face. His lips were moving, flinching with each footstep; Dad counted each stair as the noise ascended.

Each slow stomp was louder than the next, until John swore he would go deaf. The rest of the world was blotted out by the noise, a black ink splotch drowning the blue writing beneath it.

John screamed at the first blow, tiny and fragile. A hard strike against the door, a scraping as the bed lurched. A harsh demand.

“Open the door!”

The second slam splintered the wood at its hinges; John could feel the bed jump another few inches forward as the door fell inward. Dad’s arms were strangling him, nails digging into his sides like thorns. The boy’s breath came in white-hot gasps, scalding his lungs and neck as they came from the boiling cauldron of his stomach. Sound came flooding back, and he could hear a baby wailing in the streets.

“Under the bed.” His father’s words were quick murmurs in his ear, and suddenly his arms were gone. For a moment, John grabs after them, before looking up to his father.

“Be quiet.”

John remembers falling limply onto his side and scooting halfway beneath the bed frame before giving up and curling in on himself. He remembers his father kicking him, hard, to hide him away completely as the door fell in. He remembers the ache in his side and how it bruised for weeks afterward.

Light pooled on the wood floor like droplets of sunshine, flickering and orange from the intruder’s torch. John could see his father’s feet, scrambling to rise to face the looming threat in his doorway. He spoke in a rusty English accent with an awkward stutter, and John could see his mud-spattered boots as they took one, two, three slow steps toward Dad. He smells like salt, gunpowder and muck.

“How much havve you got?”

“None!” Dad spoke in a weak pant as he took a step away from the boot-clad man. “I haven’t got anything for pirates!”

“Got nothin’ for pirates?” A scoff, and the slow sigh of metal against metal. “Nothin’ at all? You sure?”

“No!”

John watched as Dad’s shoes became level with one another. His father held his ground as the pirate tracked mud into his bedroom, stayed completely still until the gunshot severed John from reality. Broad shoulders hit the ground with a cracking thud, and when he screams, it echoes in John’s stomach.

He remembers to be quiet; he doesn’t scream in fear or surprise or sadness. He remembers that his father has told him not to make noise. And so, he doesn’t.

Like a deer caught in beaconed headlights, he lays still as the man turns away, holds his breath until he can hear him walk down the staircase. Just as his father had before, John counts the sounds his feet make against the wood; fourteen, and bootheels strike on level ground. They fade away, and John can make out one hard slap on the stone outside before they mesh into the resounding cacophony outside again.

His house is silent; the sound of his breathing is deafening in the dusty confines beneath his bed. Everything is too quiet as blood creeps toward him from his father’s head, turned onto his cheek.

Finally, the eight-year-old speaks. “Daddy?”


End file.
